In contrast to Europe, where the LEC power rankings are fairly organized, North America is a mess right now. It’s a reverse of last year, when EU was the clown fiesta and NA knew what it was doing.
Right now in NA, we have four teams tied at 3-3 and four more tied at 2-4. What does that mean? Essentially that 80 percent of the league sucks. Only Liquid and Cloud9 have risen above that fray.
To sort through the madness our writers attempted to rank each team from 1 point (worst) to 10 points (best). It’s not pretty, but this is how things turned out:
| Rank | Team | Points |
| 1) | Team Liquid | 40 |
| 2) | Cloud9 | 36 |
| 3) | 100 Thieves | 30 |
| 4) | FlyQuest | 27 |
| 5) | CLG | 25 |
| 6) | Clutch Gaming | 19 |
| 7) | Echo Fox | 18 |
| 8) | OpTic Gaming | 10 |
| 9) | Golden Guardians | 9 |
| 10) | TSM | 6 |
Here’s a breakdown of each tier:
Still here: OpTic Gaming, Golden Guardians, TSM
The funny thing about this tier is that Golden Guardians went 2-0 last week, a huge improvement, and still only went up six points to go from 10 to 9 in the rankings. To be fair, they beat OpTic and TSM, the only two other teams in this tier. Their next game is against Liquid, so we’ll find out real quick just how good they are.
OpTic are struggling to play macro with the full roster together, which may be expected given the lack of practice they had with some of the visa issues they encountered. The real concern now is the player who got past those visa issues—bot laner Noh “Arrow” Dong-hyeon—might struggle in a crit ADC meta. What happens if they can’t win even one lane?
TSM are just a complete mess. Key offseason acquisitions Sergen “Broken Blade” Çelik and Andy “Smoothie” Ta have thus far not worked out. It may have been a mistake to mess with the championship roster of 2016-2017.
What’s the difference: 100 Thieves, FlyQuest, CLG, Clutch, Echo Fox
Normally we like to separate tiers when the difference between point values grows more than five or six. In this tier, 12 points is the difference between 100T and Echo Fox. But we aren’t sure that really matters.
It seems like any one of these teams could beat any of the others. 100 Thieves finally got things going with better drafts and more bot lane presence last week. It shouldn’t take a genius to figure out that you don’t sign a world champion bot laner and have him play Viktor.
FlyQuest somehow are still ranked highly despite a 0-2 week. It looks like they’re getting a pass for being crushed by Liquid. CLG actually looked kind of good until a macro throw against 100 Thieves handed over a free Baron.
Echo Fox beat FlyQuest by outscaling.
Clutch’s game vs. C9 last week was actually hilarious. Cloud9 picked Nocturne jungle and every time he ulted, Clutch scattered. If you took the best player off each of these five teams, you might have a roster capable of beating Liquid in a best-of-five.
Lonely at the top: Liquid and Cloud9
Not much has changed for these two. When they play well, they win. The good news is that they’re both well suited to transition into a mage mid lane and crit bot lane meta. We might see someone like 100 Thieves join them, but for now, it’s still lonely at the top of the LCS.
